It’s an ultra-competitive world. In academic tests at national/ international level, if you don’t finish in top few percentiles, sometimes under 1%, you’re unlikely to achieve your goal of getting admission to your dream college or that coveted fellowship.

In pursuit of such tough goals, diligent students go all out to get an edge on any front – study material, tutors, diet, energy boosters, and so on.

And even Physical Exercise (PE)!

You read it right. Physical exercise. Physical exercise of a certain kind, though. And it’ll help you even if you’ve a modest goal of just improving in your most challenging subjects.

A big submission due tomorrow? Or maybe an exam where you’ve a mountain to climb in a single night? Willy-nilly, most students need to pull out that occasional all-nighter to atone for procrastination.

How can you make an all-nighter, first of all, feasible (it’s tough, isn’t it?) and, then, less taxing on your body?

In this post, I’ll cover when you must completely avoid an all-nighter, how you can make it less painful, and what you should do the next day to recover from it fast.

If you’re like most, then you too are getting far less sleep than recommended for a balanced life.

National Sleep Foundation put together a high-powered panel of 18 scientists and researchers from reputed medical associations in the U.S. to study our daily sleep requirement. The panel gleaned through more than 300 studies, and came up with following recommendations:

You take the seat in your favorite corner, and open your math notes. Today you’re determined to complete the assignment you’ve been procrastinating for almost a week.

However, just before starting, you decide to check your inbox. You check, and you don’t find anything worth your attention. (That’s what is going to happen if you check too frequently.) Because it got done so quickly, your digital-thirst isn’t quenched. You decide to skim your Facebook feed as well. After all, you plan to be off internet for three hours immediately after this.

You’re on a slippery slope now. You like (thumbs up) few pictures, leave few comments, chuckle at a funny video, and then click on a click-bait BuzzFeed article, which lets you slip further to a YouTube video. And then few suggested videos from YouTube’s long list of seductive thumbnails and titles…

By now, you’re neck deep in entertainment and procrastination, ignoring what you set out to do.

Do you envy your classmates who study in a group? After all, it’s not easy to get illustrious classmates to rub brains with and get the benefit of knowledge of others.

If you do… then, well, you don’t need to. Because you, as a lone soul furrowing through your books and notes, are likely studying more efficiently than your classmates studying in a group.

In this post, I’ll enumerate reasons for and against group-study, and talk why self-study is better. Although there are several arguments in favor of and against each, two very fundamentals of efficient study – how you learn something and how you focus – go in favor of self-study, which kind of outweigh other factors.

That, however, doesn’t mean group-study shouldn’t get a place in your schedule. It should. As you’ll figure out in the latter part of the post, it trumps (no political connotations!) self-study under one condition.

Sunlight is better known for synthesis of vitamin D in our bodies and for improving our moods. But what is less appreciated is that it can also make us more productive.

If you study in sunlight (not direct exposure, though), you’ll be significantly more alert, less drowsy in the afternoon, thereby increasing your productivity. As a result, you’ll have a more effective study schedule and you’ll be able to study longer without getting tired.